A Baudelairean Girl

Abstract

It started with a song about Wilhelm Reich and UFOs, Patti Smith on the tape deck of my dad’s beat-up Pontiac.

I have an assignment for you, Dad said. I need you to help me understand this really weird song. Is she singing about being taken up into a big black ship? Yes, I said. Can you get the rest of the lyrics? I could, almost. I listened obsessively. I read what I could find. I looked up every poet Patti Smith had ever referenced and read until my brain was exploding from it. I was eleven.

In middle school French, we learned only that the young girls wearing hats were going to the swimming pool or perhaps, at the very most, to the beach. At no time did it occur to me to connect these girls and the language that failed them with the poems I read late at night. I read the poems in English, it never occurred to me to do otherwise.